Wondrous Beauty: The Life and Adventures of Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte (14 page)

That enduring beauty attracted suitors wherever Betsy went. Even Pauline’s husband, the Prince Borghese, vainly attempted to make Betsy his mistress. Rumors that she was about to marry one smitten suitor or another continued to spread across the Atlantic. Letters from Baltimore asked if she had already married Lord William Russell, a prominent English liberal some eighteen years her senior, and if not, when was the wedding to be? Whatever hopes Russell entertained, they would be dashed, just as the desires of another Englishman, Henry Edward Fox, would come to nothing. When the young Mr. Fox failed to win Betsy, his ardor turned to enmity, and his journal began to bristle with sour-grapes comments on her “vulgar” manners, “
the extreme profligacy of her opinions,” and even the “indecency of her expressions.” Unlike the bitter Fox, most of the men who courted Betsy conceded defeat graciously, content to settle for friendship or to admire her from afar. Sir George Dallas was typical of those who wooed her—and lost. His affection for Betsy continued from a distance. After his return to England from Italy, he confessed to his mother: “
I every Day miss Mrs Pattersons agreeable, Spirituelle, naïve Conversation and like a Harp unstrung for want of being play’d on, I feel I
am losing both my tones and my own powers in this way—she roused me.”

Yet Betsy remained alone. This was not, she assured her correspondents, because she was waiting to fall in love before marrying. She declared that romance was a concept embraced only by fools, the young—and Americans. “
The land of romance,” she observed to her father, “is now only to be found on the other side of the Atlantic.… Love in a cottage is even out of fashion in novels.” She marveled at this persistence of romance in her native country, where “foolish and unreflecting youths” plunged headlong into disastrous marriages. The blame, as Betsy saw it, lay not simply in the “whimsical self-will” of young men and women but in the “absurd folly of parents” who did not prevent mistakes from being made.

Betsy had not married Jérôme with dreams of “love in a cottage,” of course, but surely her description of the “foolish and unreflecting” youths who rushed into marriage thinking only of the present moment was more autobiographical than sociological. And surely her condemnation of American parents contained an implicit reprimand of her father for failing to prevent her own folly. Regret and anger underlay her cynicism.

The impetuous young woman who believed that the love she and Jérôme shared would solve all problems, dispel all anger, and conquer all objections was gone. In her place was an Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte who viewed marriage as a strictly social and economic institution. Its participants, she declared, should be guided by two simple rules: first, marry up or marry an equal, but never marry beneath one’s social rank; and second, if a suitable partner could not be found,
“the next best
thing to making a good match is not to make a bad one.” It was this credo, not fading looks or aging, that made Betsy declare it “improbable that I shall ever marry.” For as Betsy knew, her own “rank” was anomalous: she was an outcast of an imperial house, itself now brought low by exile and military defeat. But she had once been a Bonaparte, and her pride in how high she had risen made it impossible for her to be content with a man less prestigious than the current king of Westphalia. She put her position succinctly to William in 1829: “No consideration could have induced me to marry any one thereafter, having married the brother of an emperor.” If William considered her dilemma a creation of her own pride, she saw it as a simple reality. “It would be impossible,” she told her father, “for me ever to bend my spirit to marry any one who had been my equal before my marriage.”

An astute observer might have declared that the old saw was probably true: a cynic was only a romantic who had been hurt. But in the 1820s, it is unlikely that Betsy could have discerned that disappointment, embarrassment, and disillusionment, more than pride or reason, had shaped her condemnation of “love in a cottage.” She did know this, however: she would do all in her power to prevent her own child from making the same mistake.

It had become clear by 1823 that Bo was not fated for a union with a Bonaparte. Charlotte Bonaparte would indeed marry a cousin, but it would not be Betsy’s son. Wary of an alliance with a branch of the family whose legitimacy was clouded, Joseph had opted to marry his daughter to his brother Louis’s eldest son, Napoleon. Joseph was fond of Bo, but he preferred to be
safe rather than sorry in establishing lasting family ties. It was becoming equally clear that for Bo, no suitable alternative to Charlotte was likely to appear. Thus Betsy assumed Bo must remain a bachelor. The issue being settled—in her mind, at least—they must focus all their attention on Bo’s education and his selection of a future career. Writing to her father, she laid out her goals:
“We must instill ambition in him, keep him from marrying too low, and give him a sense of economy.”

Betsy was no stranger to ambition, and her own “sense of economy” was by now second nature.
“Disappointments,” she wrote, “teach prudence,” and over the years she had learned “the high value of money, and the importance of increasing one’s fortune.” For most of her adult life, Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte had scrimped and saved, living in respectable but modest quarters when she was in Europe and often relying on her wealthier friends to provide her with food and entertainment. On several occasions, she had politely refused to take up residence in more elegant surroundings, even when they were offered to her at no cost, because the upkeep of a carriage or a staff of servants would drain her resources. On other occasions, she had reluctantly moved in with friends who were able to share the costs involved. She knew, she told her father, that many considered her “almost a miser,” but she refused to live beyond her means. She kept a careful, perhaps excessively careful, record of all her expenditures, large and small. The only exception to this constant, careful husbanding of her money that bordered on the obsessive was her willingness to provide her son a fine education.

Betsy often worried that her own brothers’ spendthrift behavior
would influence Bo. At other times, she feared that her own unceasing efforts to instill responsibility and ambition in him had had the reverse effect, for as she observed, “
young people are often perverse and self-willed.” And the thought was always there that he had inherited his father’s impulse to spend all he had—and far more. Whatever the reason, it was becoming clear that Bo was not cut from the same cloth as his mother. As he grew older, he became less rather than more ambitious and more inclined to indulge himself; he was, in truth, a spoiled young man who loved comfort and ease. Still, he dutifully bowed to his mother’s wishes and followed the necessary steps to get into Harvard College. He spent eight months working with a tutor to improve his grasp of Greek. At last, in February 1823, he was admitted to what Betsy considered America’s finest school.

Thus far Betsy had enjoyed better luck in directing her son’s choices than William had ever enjoyed in directing hers. But Bo’s continuing extravagance troubled her. To her amazement and alarm, she discovered that he had managed to run up a bill of $2,150 during his first fifteen months back in America. Searching to understand the source of this prodigal behavior, she placed the blame on his grandfather. Once she had seen Baltimore businessmen like William Patterson as boring and consumed with accumulating money; now she concluded that their sins were greed, dishonesty, and financial profligacy.

But William, too, lectured his grandson on his excessive spending at Harvard. Bo resented what he considered their badgering. “
However advantageous I may conceive a college education to be for me,” he wrote William in March 1824, “I should prefer giving it up … rather than to hear these continual and
uninterrupted complaints about my expenses.” He insisted that he was “doing all in my power to give you satisfaction.” But in one week he had received three letters from his mother and one from William, “all teeming with reproaches.” He would live within the budget of $1,000 that his mother now set for him, he declared, even if it meant he could not afford to go home to Baltimore at the holidays.

Bo’s character flaws could not be laid solely at the feet of his father, his grandfather, or Baltimore’s capitalist culture. In truth, Betsy had created her own monster: years of assuring her son that he was special, that the Bonaparte blood running in his veins set him above most people, had shaped Bo’s character as surely as his father’s or grandfather’s example had done.

Although Bo’s extravagance got him into trouble with his mother, a different type of youthful indiscretion got him into trouble with the Harvard authorities. In 1824 he and several other students were temporarily suspended. In a long letter dated August 16, he did his best to explain the suspension to his grandfather. He had gone to a meeting of a student organization at which alcoholic punch was served. The organization was legitimate; the drinking was forbidden. All the students involved, including Bo, were punished with a ninety-day suspension. Betsy had just arrived in America when she got this news. She hurried to Massachusetts, furious with both Bo and the Harvard officials who had suspended him. When she calmed down, she realized that the affair had a positive outcome: it offered her a rare opportunity to spend a few months with her son. It was probably the happiest episode in their relationship.

When Bo returned to college, Betsy made her way to Baltimore. Almost immediately she found herself in a tense confrontation with William. Her father assumed that she had returned for good, but if this pleased him, he did not show it by welcoming his daughter back into his home. In fact, he did not want her in his house at all. Where once he had insisted that she take over her mother’s domestic duties, now he urged her to take up residence in one of her rental properties. William claimed this arrangement would be best for both of them, since Betsy’s presence had always caused “confusion” in the past. But Betsy suspected another motive: one of William’s mistresses was there to provide him all the company and care he needed.

William’s response to her homecoming made Betsy eager to return to Europe as soon as possible. But first she had to review her finances. By 1824, this tendency to watch her investments like a hawk had become second nature. Unlike most of Baltimore’s business community, she was determined to avoid making any investments linked to the war now raging between France and Spain. The conflict had been good for American trade, but it did not prompt her to put her money in shipping. She would not gamble, as most of the local merchants seemed willing to do, that the war would expand into a general European conflict. She considered this sort of speculating a fool’s errand, driven by greed. She was equally skittish about other avenues of investment, for the panics and depressions of recent years had made a deep impression on her. As she told her father, “
I have no confidence in the banks, insurance companies, road stocks, or, in short, in any stock in Baltimore.” When confidence
in the state and federal governments was fully restored, she intended to put the bulk of her money in their bonds.

No matter how shrewdly or cautiously she invested, Betsy could not consider herself financially secure. She did not have enough, she told Sydney Morgan, to return to Europe—and yet she knew that if she remained in Baltimore, she faced a lifetime of ennui, she lamented to her Irish friend. She must do as she had done for almost a decade: tighten her belt, eliminate luxuries, and escape the city of her birth. In June 1825 she sailed to Europe. This time she would not return to America for nine years.

Betsy arrived at Le Havre that summer. Although she was certainly happier to be in Europe than in Maryland, she conceded that the excitement of living abroad had begun to fade. Even Paris, despite its balls and dinner parties, had lost some of its luster, for both “Belle et Bonne” and De Staël were dead, and Sydney Morgan had returned home. Perhaps the greater problem was that Betsy Bonaparte was no longer the only American celebrity abroad. The Caton sisters, granddaughters of the richest man in Maryland, Charles Carroll, had recently become the toast of England. News that they were being feted by the Duke of Wellington, as she had once been, roused an intense jealousy in Betsy. So too did the financial support these women received from their doting grandfather. The Caton women were said to be openly seeking husbands among the English aristocracy, and the marriage settlements he would provide made them attractive to many a titled Englishman.

Betsy did nothing to hide a contempt that others, rightly, viewed as envy. While she economized, the Catons enjoyed
every luxury. It was, she wrote, her deepest wish that the duke would tire of these
“
mere
adventurers and swindlers” and of their pressure on him to find them suitable husbands. Emily and Louisa Caton, she wrote, were nothing more than “ignorant, unprincipled asses” who should never have left America. They tarnished the reputation of other women seeking cultural asylum in Europe. However, her wrath was most intensely focused on Marianne, the widow of her own brother, Robert Patterson. It was a great blow to Betsy when Marianne married Wellington’s older brother, Lord Wellesley, in the fall of 1825. Wellesley was both old and in debt, yet the marriage was hailed as a brilliant triumph for his American bride. Years later Betsy’s hostility to the Catons was undimmed. In 1867 she called them “the most pernicious foes of my life,” but their only crime seems to have been their good fortune.

Betsy’s focus on the fate of the Caton sisters was as brief as it was intense. By 1826 she had a more pressing issue to face: the Bonapartes, including her former husband, wanted her to allow Bo to return to Italy. Jérôme, along with other members of the Bonaparte family, had kept in touch with Bo throughout his college years, and Jérôme had even managed to contribute twice to his Harvard expenses. The king of Westphalia now expressed a desire to meet his oldest son. Betsy decided it was her duty to make this possible. If she denied Bo the opportunity, he might resent it.
“I should pass … for a very unfeeling parent if I do not let him see his father,” she wrote to William, a man she believed was all too often unfeeling. Worse, he might reproach himself for failing to visit Jérôme.